Friskies

Friskies hijacks Facebook with real cats

The Internet is for sharing knowledge, interacting with others, and expanding our mental and social horizons. Scrap that. The Internet is for cat videos--and Friskies knows it.

The Friskies Plus Playhouse is a social-media experiment that embeds live feeds of rescue cats into Friskies's Facebook page. Ten cats occupy a feline fantasy penthouse full of scratchers, videos of rodents and birds, an aquarium, wiggling toys, and stacks of cat food cans.

Facebook users can wait in line to activate remote-control toys to drive the felines wild. This is made possible by iPet Companion, a technology system that is already in use in several shelters around the country. … Read more

Tablet games for cats are touch-screen catnip

Once humanity surrendered control of all online media to cats, it was just a matter of time until they started pawing at our tablets, too. And now Friskies is taking a leadership role in the emerging feline-gaming market with three new games made just for cats. Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up are all available for the iPad and Android tablets.

The three titles basically play like a tablet version of the old arcade whack-a-mole, tempting kitties to paw at floating treats and fish on the touch screen. They're free, were created with HTML5 and CSS3, and can theoretically be played on just about anything with a modern browser, though they were designed with the iPad in mind. In my own hands-on tests of the Web version, the responsiveness of the fishing game was particularly cool--which is perhaps the most embarrassing product endorsement of my career.

Related links • Paint for Cats: Your cat is an iPad Picasso • Cat scratch fever--on the iPad

Friskies claims the games are based on research into cats' senses and their reaction to different stimuli. In other words, someone was paid to do what our parents always scolded us for--tease the cat.

"To develop these games for cats, we learned what truly appealed to them. Now we know their favorite colors, types of movement and their general game-play attitudes. We also found out that they cannot play pinball," Ryan Gass, assistant brand manager for Friskies, said in a release.

Even without pinball, these cats seem to be having a great time:… Read more

Not all cats are bad photographers

In September, I, or should I say my cat, was an unknowing participant in a project put together by Nestle Purina PetCare's Friskies brand of cat food. The company doled out 50 little digital cameras that slip onto a cat's collar and then the cameras were set to take a shot once every 15 minutes. The 10 best photos were then uploaded to Flickr at the end of every day. (You can check out the Flickr group and see the results for yourself.)

The project ran for about a week and once it was over, I didn't … Read more